Letter from the CEO

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the eleventh issue of the Ex Librian newsletter, by now a well established communication channel between Ex Libris and our customer community.

In recent decades, we have been witnessing processes of consolidation on many levels—geopolitical consolidation, as in the forming of the European Union; corporate mergers, extending also to the library systems industry; and even the aggregation of information, available through Web search engines for general information discovery, scholarly oriented systems such as Google Scholar, and, more recently, amalgamated repositories of scholarly materials offered by libraries, information providers, and library vendors.

On the one hand, consolidation helps organizations—even those as large as countries—to perform more efficiently and more cost effectively. It enables them to share responsibilities and tasks and often breaks down barriers between nations, people, and silos of information. It simplifies processes and creates new synergies. Yet we can also see an opposite trend, the emergence of national, cultural, and community-driven movements whose goal is to preserve and even encourage uniqueness and independence.

Ex Libris has embarked on a new, exciting route by offering Primo Central—a huge, centralized, consolidated index for scholarly materials that are of value to researchers around the world. By overcoming the challenges of remote searching in numerous information resources, on the one hand, and by sparing individual libraries from the task of harvesting large collections and maintaining immense repositories of indexes, on the other, a centralized index broadens library users’ search scope, seamlessly encompassing the wealth of the world’s scholarly materials together with the local library’s collections.

In this world of collaboration and networking, centralized indexes are sure to become a blessing for libraries and their users, though global indexes might raise a concern about the role of the individual libraries. For thousands of years, libraries have kept their focus on the specific community that they serve. Libraries have invested in fulfilling all aspects of their users’ needs—from erecting buildings and developing unique collections to designing the library branding and tailoring services to accommodate their users. In offering a huge repository of scholarly materials along with local, and sometimes unique, library collections, libraries still need to keep their own users in mind.

Our philosophy in creating the Primo Central index is to place the library and the user at the center of the research environment and to enable libraries to keep tailoring that environment and their services to their users. Not only will Primo Central subscribers continue to offer their users a locally branded look and feel and to shape the scope of available scholarly materials, but the Primo system will also help prevent the individual collection of any given library from “drowning” in the overall search scope of hundreds of millions of scholarly articles and e-books. We are building the world of knowledge around the library nucleus. We want to give you the best tools to help you carry on with your role in serving your user community, delivering the information that your members seek, and promoting individual thinking and creativity in the midst of globalization.

Sincerely yours,

Matti Shem TovPresident and CEO, Ex Libris

Developer Meets Developer at the Chicago R&D Center

Developer Meets Developer at the Chicago R&D Center

Another milestone in the Ex Libris open-platform program was reached in March 2009 with the second Developer Meets Developer meeting. Developers from 12 institutions joined members of the Ex Libris development team in the Company’s Chicago office for two days of in-depth technical discussions about the open aspects of the Voyager® integrated library system. The first Developer Meets Developer meeting, at which developers focused on the Aleph®, MetaLib®, SFX®, and Primo® solutions, took place at the Ex Libris research and development center in Jerusalem in November 2008.

Ex Libris development, implementation, and support personnel were joined by participants representing libraries in Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The meeting’s primary goal was to introduce customer developers to the open architecture of Ex Libris products, particularly the open interfaces that were introduced in Voyager version 7, and to learn about the code extensions that the customer developers have written to customize Voyager and extend its functionality.

Dennis Sherman, Chicago URM team leader, opened the meeting with his presentation on open architecture at Ex Libris, focusing on the current infrastructure and the Company’s plans for the future. Next, Revital Marck, Aleph development manager and leader of the open-platform program, described the steps that she and her team have taken to set the open-platform program in motion—the work that has gone into identifying, developing, and documenting open interfaces. In addition, she discussed the development workflow, version control, and support in the context of open interfaces.

The afternoon session was devoted to customer developers’ presentations:

Andrew Isherwood (Aberystwyth University) presented an enhanced item information display for records in the OPAC and a system for automatically sending circulation messages to patrons via e-mail.

Paul Asay (Indiana State University) presented a code extension that provides links to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble in the facets area of the Tomcat OPAC bibliographic display.

Ere Maijala (National Library of Finland) demonstrated the implementation of an OAI-PMH provider for Voyager; features of the locally developed enhancement script for WebVoyage Classic; customizations for the WebVoyage look and feel; simple MARC check scripts; and a new system that replicates records from the Aleph-based central catalog to local Voyager databases.

Gary Strawn (Northwestern University) presented a toolkit that handles vernacular scripts, and an adjunct to the authority loader to help librarians work through problem reports.

Michael North (Northwestern University) described locally developed Perl-related programs that are used, for example, to export acquisition data (vouchers) to Northwestern’s newly implemented PeopleSoft financial programs.

Jim Robinson (Tarrant County College) talked about a Java spell-checker and its incorporation in WebVoyage.

Andy Kohler (UCLA) discussed ways in which UCLA handles the retrieval of circulation and location information from Voyager for the library’s OCLC WorldCat Local implementation.

Bob Trotter (University of Georgia) described an institutional billing system that is based on an analysis of the library’s Universal Borrowing data and accumulated lost-book data.

Michael Doran (University of Texas at Arlington) talked about three Voyager add-ons: a 'New-Books List,' displayed in WebVoyage; a schedule that shows reservations and current checkouts of Voyager short-loan items; and ShelfLister, a Voyager client for generating real-time shelf lists.

Jeffrey Barnett (Yale University) described the work done at Yale around open-source software, such as Sakai, Lucene, Fedora Commons, Solr, Tomcat, CAS, VuFind, CNRI Handle, OAI-PMH, and Google. Jeffrey also presented a recent usability analysis of Voyager, Primo, and VuFind.

EL Commonsisa collaborative Web site where Ex Libris customers and the Company share knowledge, ideas, documentation, and code. Open to all Ex Libris community members, EL Commons consists of a wiki, administered by the IGeLU and ELUNA user groups, and the Developer Zone. On the wiki, customers can post and find useful content, such as tips and “how to” information. The Developer Zone fulfills two main functions: it serves as the repository for the Ex Libris documentation describing all the open interfaces (APIs, deep links, plug-ins, and adapters) of Ex Libris products, and it is the site where community members upload code extensions that they have developed and are happy to share. All customers can download these code extensions and implement them, with or without modifications, at their institution.

The day ended with an evening tour of downtown Chicago and dinner at Andy’s Jazz Club.

The second day started with a presentation by Chi-Hoi Duong, Voyager open-platform program focal point, who spoke about Voyager Web services and their implementation. Split up into working groups, the participants discussed the Voyager back-office environment and the Voyager end-user interface. The meeting ended with a discussion about the ways in which customers can take advantage of Voyager Web services and make the EL Commons Web site valuable for the entire customer community.

The participants were extremely positive about the meeting, commenting on how fruitful the sessions were and expressing appreciation for the opportunity to meet Ex Libris developers and discuss concrete, technical issues. Ex Libris developers were thrilled with the direct interaction with customer developers and felt that the meeting enriched them and helped them understand how their code is being used.

With the successful conclusion of this second Developer Meets Developer meeting, Ex Libris has already begun preparing for the next one. Plans are to continue holding such meetings twice a year and, at the same time, to work with individuals within the community and encourage them to share their code. In addition, Ex Libris is looking forward to involving customer developers in future initiatives.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all meeting participants—customers and Ex Libris staff members—for contributing to the success of this collaborative effort. These meetings are an integral part of the Ex Libris open-platform program and help us understand each other and work together for the benefit of the library community.

Ex Libris Enters the Blogosphere

Ex Libris Enters the Blogosphere

The first half of 2009 was an exciting time for the company, featuring the launches of the bX recommender service and the Unified Resource Management (URM) development partner program, and further exciting developments in Primo with the announcement of Primo Central. With so much happening and so many important changes in the library technology industry, we had a great deal of news to share via a new, real-time communication channel. The Ex Libris Initiatives blog and the Ex Libris Commentary blog have fulfilled this role perfectly.

The Initiatives blogprovides updates and insight on new Ex Libris programs and activities, with topics ranging from the bX usage-based scholarly article recommender service—now used in close to 200 institutions around the world—to reflections on digital preservation, Primo Central, the new centralized index of scholarly e-content, and URM.

The Ex Libris Commentary blog, by Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, considers the bigger picture of the library technology industry. Building on his many years of leadership in the library automation community, Carl offers his views on the market and on librarianship in general. Carl’s blog has already made a substantial impact with posts on the role of libraries in the economic crisis, the importance of digital preservation, thoughts on collaboration with the library community, a poignant tribute to veteran library technology expert Jim Michael, and a guest blog from Derek Whitehead, President of the Australian Library and Information Association.

Complementing the blogs, Ex Libris has begun using the social networking site Twitter to communicate with customers and colleagues around the world. With over 460 followers when the newsletter went to press, and the number of followers growing daily, Twitter has become an indispensable medium for informing people about conferences, events, interesting sales and live sites, updates from the library community, and of course, for announcing when new blog posts are available. It has also sparked some lively conversations among Ex Libris customers over the Twitter network and at industry events.

In this spirit of encouraging conversations in addition to announcements, we invite you to visit the blogs and share your views on these developments with the community.

Karina Koch, marcom specialist

Primo Central: Thinking Big!

Primo Central: Thinking Big!

Primo Central is a centralized, hosted Primo® index that covers data harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. All implementations of Primo can search in Primo Central while also searching in a local index. The outcome is a merged result list of local and remote materials, sorted by relevance.

Ex Libris plans to release Primo Central for beta testing at the end of 2009.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the only way for researchers to discover sufficient information about a topic was by accessing multiple sites, which could be library catalogs, abstracting and indexing databases, e-journal repositories, and institutional digital repositories, to name just a few. At the beginning of this decade, metasearch systems such as Ex Libris MetaLib® emerged to provide an effective solution that enables users to access heterogeneous resources through a single gateway. These systems provide libraries with the means to offer remote resources in a controlled and focused manner and spare users from the need to know where and how to search for relevant materials. Despite its many advantages, metasearching does not meet user expectations in terms of speed and the ability to see all results—local and remote—in a single list.

More recently, new discovery and delivery systems, often referred to as “next-gen” systems, have been developed. These systems—among them, Ex Libris Primo—harvest metadata from library-controlled resources and create a local index in which the library’s users search. Having preprocessed the information, such systems offer a user experience that meets the expectations of today’s users for an information discovery process that is user friendly, fast, intuitive, and interactive. Searching in Primo, in particular, is simple, but the underlying search component is extremely sophisticated, and the response time is excellent. The Primo unified search interface also facilitates searching in remote, typically licensed, information resources; however, it is the MetaLib metasearch engine that brings the results from the remote resources. To better address the desire for a unified search interface, a rapid response time, and a unified result list, a library can harvest remote resources and add the harvested data to the local Primo index—but doing so is a laborious and resource-consuming task.

Recent technology advances and the desire of information providers to enhance the discoverability of their content have brought the next logical stage in the evolution of information discovery: the creation of centralized indexes for materials that are of value to scholars around the world. Primo Central is such an index and is compiled, hosted, and maintained by Ex Libris on behalf of the Primo community. Primo Central covers hundreds of millions of scholarly materials, primarily articles and e-books, and it indexes the data obtained from information providers—primarily metadata but also abstracts and full text, when available.

Searching in Primo Central together with a local Primo index significantly enhances the Primo capability of searching in remote resources, making it quicker and more efficient, yet it relieves each and every library from the task of harvesting and indexing this data itself. The result is a coherent information landscape for library users of every institution deploying Primo, a landscape in which searching is seamless in remote and local resources and search results are displayed in a single blended result list. Once a user has found an item of interest, the information provider’s system carries out the actual delivery.

The local Primo system of a library that subscribes to the Primo Central service searches in both the local Primo index and Primo Central and presents the search results as a single result list, sorted by relevance. The library retains its control over the scope of materials accessed by its users and over the display of the results. In particular, the library can opt to display the results obtained from Primo Central separately from those obtained from the local Primo index. The inclusion of Primo Central in the library’s search scope complies with its license terms for scholarly materials and requires no technological infrastructure or ongoing maintenance on the part of the library.

Linking by Primo to remote databases, enabling users to conduct searches in the native interface of any such database

Because information resources in the library space are so diverse in terms of the kind of content that they offer and the technological interfaces that they support, and the needs of libraries are varied as well, the combination of these Primo search technologies enables each library to construct a search environment that suits its users and offer it through a single system, Primo. Furthermore, by using Primo Central and networking with other libraries, a library can provide an information landscape that extends beyond its boundaries in a manner that appears seamless to end users.

As we go forward, we will be working with Primo Central partner libraries, drawing on their experience and expertise to shape this new and exciting service. We expect to start the beta testing of Primo Central with partner libraries at the end of 2009. Meanwhile, more and more information providers are participating in Primo Central by contributing their data to this growing repository. For a list of information providers that are enabling Primo Central to harvest their data see our press release from July 9, 2009. More providers are coming on board all the time, and the response has been extremely encouraging. We look forward to seeing this huge repository become a vital and valuable component of every Primo environment

Extending the Openness of Aleph and Voyager

Extending the Openness of Aleph and Voyager

Following the recommendations of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and in line with the open-platform program of Ex Libris, the Aleph® and Voyager® development teams are now working on increasing the openness of these Ex Libris integrated library systems (ILSs) to facilitate their integration with other systems in the library, primarily new discovery and delivery tools, such as Primo®. Both Aleph and Voyager already provide access to a wide range of functionality through open interfaces—Web services and X-Services—which are documented in the EL Commons Developer Zone and are available to all customers.

Understanding the need for discovery solutions that cover materials and services originating from a variety of systems, not necessarily the traditional systems of a library, the DLF established the ILS Discovery Interface (ILS-DI) task group to analyze the issues involved in the integration of a discovery system with an ILS and to create a technical proposal for such integration. The task group addressed the need to expose the valuable data that is stored and managed by library systems and to enable the new discovery layer to provide the end-user services that are now in the domain of these systems.

Of specific interest to Ex Libris is what the DLF ILS-DI group calls “level 3: elementary OPAC alternative,” described as follows:

A set of functions needed for a practical discovery application that can operate completely independently of the OPAC. Such an application would need the essential discovery and delivery features of an OPAC, including search and browse, real time availability information, delivery, and patron services. While not all of the OPAC's functionality has to be replicated in the application, enough has to be available to make it attractive to users as an alternative to the normal OPAC interface.*

In its recommendations, the task group also proposes a standardized XML-based Web services application-programming interface (API) model that will “enable developers outside of the library community to more easily access the information stored within the ILS, creating opportunities for greater integration with non-library applications like course management tools” (p. 4).

The ongoing commitment of Ex Libris to support industry standards is motivating the Company to implement APIs on the basis of the DLF ILS-DI group’s recommendations. In addition, these recommendations coincide with the functionality now under development for Primo version 3. One of the highlights of this new Primo version, due to be released at the end of 2009, is the exposure of OPAC functionality to the end user via the Primo user interface. Although Primo already exposes administrative information (such as the availability of items) that comes from the ILS, users are directed to the library system for doing tasks such as placing a hold request and looking at their library card. The aim of the current development is to provide all end-user interaction with the library through one interface, the interface of Primo, while the OPAC functionality is still maintained in the ILS.

The DLF ILS-DI recommendations describe ILS functions that are required for the implementation of external discovery tools. Examples of such ILS functions are GetAvailability (which provides the availability of the items associated with a set of bibliographic or item identifiers), GetPatronStatus (which provides various types of information about a patron), and HoldTitle (which generates a title-level hold request for a patron). The recommendations also address potential technological implementations of these functions. As it turns out, these technical recommendations are in accordance with the current shift by Ex Libris toward the implementation of new APIs as representational state transfer (REST) Web services. REST is more than a method for building Web services; rather, it is a collection of network architecture principles that outline how resources are defined and addressed across systems.

Using APIs to establish interoperability between Ex Libris systems is another step in the Company’s move toward service-oriented programming and helps ensure that not only are Ex Libris products built in a modular and interoperable manner but also that other software applications can use the Ex Libris APIs for carrying out complete tasks. The set of REST APIs now under development will include eight new services. These services will be available in Aleph version 20.1, scheduled for release in October 2009, and in Voyager version 7.2, scheduled for release in December 2009. Looking ahead, Ex Libris plans to add more REST APIs.

Once the new set of APIs is available in Aleph and Voyager, the integration of Primo and the Ex Libris library systems will rely on standardized APIs, rather than proprietary APIs, and will result in greater interoperability. Institutions that implement Primo with Aleph or Voyager will be able to offer a coherent user experience for all the interactions between a user and the library. It is hoped that vendors of other library systems will take similar steps and develop APIs that comply with the DLF ILS-DI recommendations, thus enabling their library customers to better serve patrons through Primo or another discovery and delivery tool.

Working Together to Grow MetaLib

Working Together to Grow MetaLib

The first half of 2009 was a busy period for MetaLib® customers and the Ex Libris MetaLib development and support teams as we worked together on a number of projects. In March 2009, Ex Libris announced the release of MetaLib version 4.3. Over 35 major enhancements, originating largely from requests made by the MetaLib user community, were included in this product release. These enhancements further streamline staff workflows to maximize efficiency and reduce total cost of ownership, and they provide powerful yet flexible management tools that can be easily adapted to customers’ local environments and practices. This increased flexibility enables the library staff of institutions running MetaLib—over 1,400 sites in 50 countries worldwide—to be even more responsive to the evolving needs of their users.

Representatives of the Finnish National Electronic Library (FinELib), California State University, and Duke University participated in MetaLib version 4.3 collaborative testing. The valuable feedback offered by the experienced users at these sites was extremely helpful as Ex Libris development, implementation, support, and product management teams finalized the new product version for general release.

The knowledge base, which now contains more than 2000 resources and has expanded by 25% over the last year, is another important focal point of Ex Libris activity. What makes this knowledge base the best in the federated search market is its coverage—which extends to a huge number of diverse resources—and its top-quality connectors, which yield a high level of search accuracy. The knowledge base team uses a three-step quality assuranceprocess for every resource added to the knowledge base: three levels of quality assurance (QA) testing, or “distilling,” are applied to each new resource (see an article on this topic in the July 2008 Ex Librian). In the first half of 2009, the number of searchable database connectors in the knowledge base surpassed 2,000. In the past 12 months, 417 new resources were added, representing an increase of 25% over the previous 12 months. Recent additions to the knowledge base include the following:

LexisNexis® SDK connectors, which make full-text searches possible in the major LexisNexis Academic databases (LexisNexis expects to add more databases to the MetaLib KnowledgeBase in the future)

The new ebrary XML API, developed by ebrary in collaboration with Ex Libris

In the near future, we will be writing connectors for federated-search APIs by Facts on File, arXive.org, and Thomson Reuters Healthcare.

Regional diversity continues to be a high priority. Since the beginning of 2009, we have expanded the knowledge base with a wide variety of region-specific resources, including six resources in French, five in Spanish, 27 related to the Asia-Pacific region, and a number of global resources requested by customers from Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

As always, customers who build their own local configurations are invited to export them as XML files and share them with the rest of the community via eService, the Ex Libris customer relationship management (CRM) system.

The success of the knowledge base testifies to the teams’ commitment to working with customers and vendors. As collaboration between Ex Libris and our customers and within the customer community itself continues to flourish, so, too, will the breadth and the quality of the Ex Libris knowledge base.

What's New in SFX?

What's New in SFX?

SFX—the first OpenURL link resolver—is still the most popular worldwide.[1] While linking to electronic content is always the focus of SFX, the breadth of SFX functionality has been significantly enhanced over the years to meet the evolving requirements of our continually growing customer base—which today numbers over 1800 sites located in 50 countries around the world.

Today, SFX is a true intermediary between the various platforms and systems that the library employs to guide end users to the best services available. Examples of such services are links to electronic full text or to a service providing a printed copy, links to tables of contents and abstracts, and options for downloading citations. The openness of SFX and its ease of customization, together with its extensive functionality and modules for usage collection, statistics, and e-resource collection analysis, make the solution truly unique in the marketplace.

The knowledge base, which lies at the heart of SFX and serves as the basis for many of its functions, is naturally a key focus of our work. In the last 12 months, the knowledge base has grown by 40% to include thousands of full-text targets, and 50% more e-book targets. The range of resources includes global and regional targets as well as those designed in partnership with consortia. The addition of regional targets continues to be central to our strategy. In the first half of 2009, we added a significant number of French, Spanish, German, and Asian language targets.

In recent months, important targets were added from the following publishers:

Karger: Journal Archive Collection, which consists of five medical packages. The collection includes all Karger journal issues starting with each title's original publication and continuing to 1997. Karger expects to complete the collection by the end of 2009.

Knovel: Sustainable Energy and Development collection of 58 books from various publishers, covering all aspects of green technology

Gale®: 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, the largest single archive of 17th and 18th century news media available from the British Library. The original full-text newspapers and pamphlets from the United Kingdom were collected by the Reverend Charles Burney.

vLex: Legal books and journals from 132 countries in 13 languages

Among the resources that we are adding in the near future are ebrary Public Library Complete collection; ebrary Religion, Philosophy & Classics; ebrary Sociology & Anthropology; and ABC-CLIO’s History Reference Online.

The SFX team is hard at work designing and developing our next major product release—SFX version 4.0—which focuses on providing greater efficiency for library staff, and enhancing the e-book user experience. Stay tuned for more information and updates on this exciting new product version.

Thoughts on the bX Scholarly Recommender Service, Live at Aalborg University in Denmark

Thoughts on the bX Scholarly Recommender Service

Aalborg University of Denmark was one of the first SFX customers to subscribe to the bX recommender service, immediately following the beta release of the service in May 2009. Kasper Lovschall, from Aalborg University Library, offers his views on bX and the ways in which it complements the library’s services and enhances users’ research experience.

Back in 2005, I participated in the CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI4) and saw a presentation given by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel, “A framework for assessing impact of units of scholarly communication based on OAI-PMH harvesting of usage information,” The presentation focused on what has become bX: a recommender service based on the actual scholarly usage of articles. Back then, I was thrilled with this revolutionary idea, which went well beyond the traditional vetted citation data, by taking real-life usage data as a starting point. Best of all, the rankings shown in the presentation correlated significantly with the Institute for Scientific Information's impact factor and also showed a more comprehensive assessment of scholarly impact.

So when the rumors of the Ex Libris bX system’s impending release began to surface, I was very pleased to learn that the ideas of Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel had found their way into a product that was immediately available to the end user and not limited to people who were experts in bibliometrics. Also, importantly, bX is a product that emerged with a scientific background, eliminating many of the "Can we really trust this?" questions.

As a research library, we would like to be among the forerunners of technology, but in these Web 2.0 times, we often run into drawbacks stemming from the single library's limited number of users. What is the value of ratings, comments, and usage if we simply have too few transactions to make the statistics reliable? The bX service takes the right approach of collecting statistics from many libraries, thus making its recommendations more statistically reliable. Also, I very much like the idea that for once, our library is introducing a product that lets actual users benefit from some of the immense quantities of usage data that we collect—and even without our putting hours of work into making this happen! Products like this show that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model will probably become more and more relevant to the library world.

Usage statistics are essential to bX. Therefore, I would strongly encourage institutions considering a subscription to bX to contribute their own usage statistics. It is important that the database grow with contributions from many institutions.

Our SFX server is an essential service of Aalborg University Library, but the menu needed some additional value going beyond traditional linking services. The links to full text are, of course, the main reason for having a link resolver; today, however, a link to Google Scholar, RefWorks, and ISI isn't quite as sensational as it was some years ago. SFX really needed some killer functionality, and I think that bX has filled that gap and moved SFX back into the league of innovation.

bX fits naturally into a user’s exploratory search behavior and supports new findings and inspiration—this is true serendipity. The possibility of showing the availability of direct full text is nice, but things get really fun when you "data mine" recommendations by following one after another.

Furthermore, the openness of bX enables you to implement it in services beyond SFX. I really look forward to implementing bX recommendations in the Primo® user interface, especially the Primo Deep Search functionality. This will make the one-stop approach to library services even more complete.

Making Digital Preservation Affordable: An Opportunity for Consortia

Making Digital Preservation Affordable: An Opportunity for Consortia

The field of digital preservation is one of growing interest, information, best practices, and software and hardware solutions. However, according to Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey (2004), “it is economically impractical for every collecting institution to develop local digital preservation capabilities” (p. 7). Although the costs of engaging in digital preservation are substantial, when compared to the cost of lost digital information, they appear miniscule. In the midst of an economic crisis, almost any expense can appear insurmountable, regardless of the logic for making the investment. One way for libraries and cultural organizations to bring things back into focus—and to make those costs more affordable—is through cooperative arrangements in dealing with digital preservation.

On the basis of my reading and experience, I would recommend that consortia interested in digital preservation keep the following principles in mind:

Education: One thing that is abundantly clear to those active in digital preservation is how little is understood about the field by most librarians. As a result, many digital preservation initiatives begin with extensive education programs to bring everyone up to speed. A number of consortia already offer shared educational programs, so extending these programs to cover digital preservation is not difficult. Offering such services to members is a very effective way for a consortium to establish itself as a thought leader. (For information on training in digital preservation, contact Ex Libris.)

Development of return-on-investment business models: There are several approaches that can be taken to generate sustainable business models for digital preservation. One frequently used approach stems from the Effective Strategic model for the Preservation and disposal of Institutional Digital Assets (espida) project, which was conducted at the University of Glasgow with funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). This approach “is exploring how intangible assets might be valued in order to make a sound business case to ensure the longevity of information objects; in other words, achieve truly sustainable preservation”(Currall and McKinney 2006, 1).

Development of policies: Answers must be developed to questions such as what will be retained, for how long, and at what level of preservation. Policies need to extend not only to the selection and maintenance of what goes into the preservation system but also the issue of deselection and the removal of items from the system. Policy development is a significant challenge. Many organizations starting a digital preservation program skip this step, an omission that is almost always regretted. Through the cross-institutional creation of policies, the systems that are implemented will be more readily shared and more easily explained to a broader range of potential end users.

Shared staff and expertise: Individuals with expertise in digital preservation are still rare and thus expensive to hire and keep. A consortium offers a substantial advantage by distributing this cost and providing an environment that will challenge such experts with intellectually stimulating work.

Copyright handling: Depending on the organization of preservation efforts, copyright clearance for an item may or may not have been secured before the item enters the preservation system. In any event, ensuring copyright compliance for digital materials is a large, complicated task that is potentially fraught with many unknown answers (as you migrate between digital formats, have you “changed” the object, and how it will now render?). Establishing a copyright-handling service and sharing it among members of consortia could be a smart economic move for all.

Identifying opportunities for economies of scale: Clearly, given the significant costs of hardware, software, processes, and personnel needed to run a full digital preservation program, spreading those costs among a broader number of institutions offers real potential to make the program more affordable. Many institutions enter the digital preservation field thinking about preserving a specific collection or type of material (such as videos, postcards, or posters). However, as preservation capabilities become known across the community served by an organization, additional requests may emerge. Thus, factoring scalability into the planned costs and growth of the service is essential, as is a model for distributing the costs of such scalability over a larger number of institutions—again, to make the costs more affordable.

Adopting a disaggregated approach: A disaggregated approach is one in which “the various components of the preservation process are broken apart into separate services distributed over multiple organizations…” (Lavoie and Dempsey, 2004, p. 8). This idea is particularly applicable to consortia, in which the diversity of the member organizations will likely provide the wide range of skills and resources needed for a digital preservation operation. Lavoie and Dempsey point out that each of the major components, ranging from the hardware and network to the software, metadata, migration, emulation, and discovery, can be handled by a different organization—yet together, the components would appear as a unified system to the end user.

Digitization: Most organizations already run some type of digitization program, ranging from a desktop scanner system to a partnership with an enterprise like Google. The challenge here is to coordinate activities to prevent duplication and, where possible, to prioritize scanning so that decaying items will undergo scanning earlier rather than later. Again, a consortium can provide substantial value in coordinating such efforts and can perhaps help move items to member organizations that possess the necessary scanning equipment.

As noted at the start of this article, digital preservation is an evolving field. Because digital content will continue to grow at exponential rates, the challenges in handling it are substantial. Lavoie and Dempsey note the benefits of cooperation, given “the fact that digital preservation is expensive, funding is scarce, and preservation responsibilities are diffused” (p. 6). Consortia, many of which are struggling today to exist in a challenging and changing economic environment, will find new opportunities to provide value to their membership. Also, as Lavoie and Dempsey explain, “the fact that both the benefits of access and the costs of long-term maintenance are shared by a large number of institutions would furnish a strong incentive to contribute materials to these shared digital collections” (p. 6), thus increasing the likelihood of the service’s success, growth, and sustainability. When considered in the aggregate, all of these factors make digital preservation a natural fit for consortia.

Collaborating with the Public to Build a Digital Repository

Collaborating with the Public to Build a Digital Repository

As digital asset management systems (or digital repositories) become commonplace, many institutions are taking advantage of the flexibility offered by these repositories to extend the reach of their collections. Open, Web-based solutions such as the DigiTool® digital asset management system and Ex Libris Rosetta digital preservation system, enable end users to take part in enriching digital collections through the deposit of materials and metadata that often reach beyond the traditional scope of the libraries that own these collections. Some Ex Libris customers serve as great examples of this type of collaborative program.

The Library of Virginia State Publication Depository Program uses DigiTool (http://digitool1.lva.lib.va.us:8881/R) to enable over 140 state agencies to offer the citizens of Virginia with free access to publications produced by a variety of state government entities. Under the program, the library “collects and distributes the publications to designated depository libraries around the state, and maintains a digital repository for electronic government publications” (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/agencies/statedocs/).

The library has set up tailored deposit workflows via which state agencies deposit material directly into the DigiTool system. Once material has been deposited, it is available for the public to search and view.

Haifa University Library in Israel is building a special collection in its DigiTool (http://digitool.haifa.ac.il/R) for specific regions and historical eras into which individuals and organizations will be allowed to deposit material. This method enables the public to build a much larger collection while preserving the role of the institution’s staff as managers of the overall structure of the collection. The library also plans to enable the public to help in the enrichment and improvement of its metadata through tags and suggestions—such as the names of people or places shown in photographs.

Ex Libris supports this type of collaborative initiative by adding features and functions to its DigiTool and Rosetta digital solutions. Some of the features that Ex Libris is considering are:

Automatically forming collections based on the metadata of the deposited material (for example, collections organized according to year, author, state, and combinations of these elements)

Direct deposit of material to designated collections

Automatic publishing for certain depositors

Greater flexibility in the public workflows available for depositing material, and depositing information for tagging and metadata

Increased flexibility in access-right management and the watermarking of material for delivery

As the examples in this article demonstrate, collaboration with other institutions and the public is transforming the way digital collections are created and maintained. Gathering information from the public makes the library a unique source of knowledge that consists of, and is defined by, its special collections.

The future of digital repositories points towards enabling institutions to collaborate with each other and with the general public to develop both the items and the knowledge (metadata) contained in their collections. We can expect to see more and more examples of how institutions are building flexible digitization programs to best exploit this growing collaboration.

Tomer Paz, DigiTool product manager

URM Partnership Program: Customer + Collaboration = Success

URM Partnership Program: Customer + Collaboration = Success

Collaboration with customers and the library industry is a fundamental value of Ex Libris and thus also a core component of the URM development philosophy. To ensure that we work closely, frequently, and interactively with our customer community and the library community at large as we move ahead with such an ambitious and strategically important project as the development of URM, we have created a number of formal and informal collaborative forums.

Why Collaborate?

As indicated in my posting to the Ex Libris Initiatives blog, libraries themselves have a strong history of and commitment to collaboration and cooperation and have, for many decades, developed their own formal and ad hoc mechanisms to support this commitment. We at Ex Libris want to build on this collaborative approach not only in our design of URM—which itself will foster more types, and new types, of collaboration and cooperation among libraries—but also in the process of developing URM. To achieve this goal, we have put in place two formal mechanisms that support collaboration with customers—our URM Development Partner Program and URM Focus Group Program. These programs are the result of numerous interviews and meetings that we have held with librarians and other stakeholders around the world while putting together our initial plans for URM. The interviews, which often ran to many hours, gave us a broad perspective on the future of academic, national, and research libraries globally. We firmly believe that our plans for URM reflect this breadth of viewpoints and recognize the continued importance of asking for and listening to community input as we move forward.

Our Development Partners

Key to our development collaboration is the URM Development Partner Program. We are now working with three partners—Princeton University and Boston College in North America and the K.U.Leuven/LIBIS library network in Europe. More information on the partnership program can be found in our recent press release.

In early June 2009, we formally kicked off the Development Partner Program with a two-day meeting held at Boston College, attended by representatives of the three partner institutions’ and Ex Libris staff members working directly on URM development, hailing from the Jerusalem, Boston, and Chicago offices. We reviewed the full scope of URM, looked at mock-ups of various functions, and examined in detail some key components, such as the metadata management system and the data services environment. The partners were clearly impressed with the work that Ex Libris has accomplished and were eager to move forward with the collaboration. We are now meeting regularly with the partners and soliciting their feedback and input on the requirements, specifications, design, and overall functionality of the URM framework. We continue to work closely with our partners to ensure that URM stays true to its vision and strategy.

URM Focus Groups

In addition to the Development Partner Program, Ex Libris is engaging with customers in a number of complementary ways to bring a broader perspective to bear on our development of URM. The URM Focus Group Program is foremost among these. We worked closely with ELUNA (Ex Libris Users of North America) and IGeLU (International Group of Ex Libris Users) to identify customer institutions interested in participating in formal focus groups. Well over 150 customers responded to our initial request; some 80 volunteers, representing Ex Libris customer libraries of many sizes and types from all parts of the world, were selected to serve on focus groups around the following topics:

The URM metadata management environment

Selection and acquisition functions and interoperability

Fulfillment and patron management

Consortial requirements

Our first focus group sessions were held in June 2009, via webinar. In addition to asking the groups to review requirements and mock-ups of URM functionality, we are taking advantage of the diversity of libraries represented in the focus groups to solicit input on topics that we consider critical as we develop URM. Topics to be explored range from the more traditional back-office management functionality that URM must support, to ways of ensuring that URM will achieve its goals of streamlining workflow and offering new and different opportunities for libraries themselves to collaborate and cooperate.

More to Come

While these programs are keeping us quite busy, we are looking to expand our collaboration with customers as we develop URM. We will be offering opportunities at major trade shows and conferences for customers to hear more about URM and participate in mini-focus group sessions on specific topics. We will also be launching a series of customer webinars focused on URM so that those customers who are unable to participate more directly in a URM event can stay informed of our progress.

State Library of Queensland: Moving Ahead with One Search Powered by Primo

State Library of Queensland: Moving Ahead with Primo

Established in 1902, the State Library of Queensland serves the population of Queensland, collaborating with public libraries throughout the state, and greater Australia. Its collections of books (including rare books), journals, magazines, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, music, photographs, films and videos, electronic resources, and archives constitute Queensland’s documentary heritage. These resources are now available through One Search, the State Library’s Primo® interface, which was launched as a Beta version in October 2008.

Since the launch, the State Library of Queensland has taken advantage of the flexibility and open-platform methodology of Primo and enhanced the One Search interface to meet the specific needs of its library users. Most recently, the library created an extension for a Family History view, which was designed to fulfill the requirements of a particular special interest group—family historians.

“The State Library of Queensland’s large collection of genealogical resources, covering convicts, immigration, shipping, births, deaths, marriages, and general family history resources from Queensland and other states and countries is discoverable through One Search, but the Family History view is particularly useful as a gateway to family history databases constructed by the library,” explained Vicki Bates, manager of library applications in the State Library’s Resource Discovery department.

“For example, the State Library’s Convict Transportation Registers database contains details for over 123,000 of the estimated 160,000 convicts transported to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. These details were painstakingly transcribed from the Australian Joint Copying Project microfilm over many years. They have now been successfully migrated to the Voyager® integrated library system run by Queensland State Library, and are discoverable through the One Search Family History view,” added Ms Bates.

The State Library will continue to add other collections related to family history over the coming months. Next in line are collections devoted to the appointment and removals of Queensland railway employees from 1890 to 1915, and miners involved in Queensland mining accidents from 1882 to 1935.

2.In the Search for Family History Resources box, type the search term convict and click Go.

3.Click the Timothy Ryan record (the first record in result list) to see the details.

4.Click Find all of the records for this voyage.

The local Find all of the records for this voyage link carries out a canned Primo search and displays records for the voyage.

The State Library’s One Search feature will soon be enhanced with the implementation of the Ex Libris DigiTool® digital asset management system, which will enable all the digital images in the Pictures Queensland collection to be discoverable through One Search. Users will be able to order copies of images through the Order a Copy link that displays an online order form.

At present, the client payment process is conducted at the library premises; however, the State Library intends to add e-commerce functionality to the image ordering service in the near future.

Some of the library’s other noteworthy modifications to the Primo interface include links to local thumbnails, links to searches in WorldCat® Identities and Libraries Australia, and links to legal deposit and location maps. The library has also added numerous local fields to the interface, such as Performer, Additional notes, Target audience, Cartographic data (including geotagging in the Picture Queensland records), and aliases in the convict records. In addition, persistent links have been created in the Pictures Queensland records.

The State Library of Queensland has applied many open-platform enhancements to its Primo interface in a very short time frame, and will no doubt continue to take advantage of Primo’s open interfaces to further improve the discovery and delivery service for library users.

Holley Dumble, business development executive, Ex Libris (Australia)

NBD/Biblion in the Netherlands Sets Off with Ex Libris Primo and Aleph

NBD/Biblion in the Netherlands Sets Off with Ex Libris Primo and Aleph

In April 2009, representatives of Ex Libris and NBD/Biblion, a library supply organization in the Netherlands, held a press conference and a festive signing ceremony to mark NBD/Biblion’s adoption of the Ex Libris Primo® and Aleph® systems.

Reaching five million citizens of the Netherlands, NBD/Biblion offers products and services, including central information technology services, a national distribution service, a central online catalog of over 600,000 titles, and more, to hundreds of the country’s public libraries. Twice a week, all libraries can receive information, interlibrary loans, and media via NBD/Biblion. National education campaigns also take advantage of this distribution system to reach a large audience.

The press conference marking the signing of the contract took place on April 4, 2009, at the NBD/Biblion headquarters in Leidschendam, a beautiful Dutch city close to Leiden. Mr. Henk Das, CEO of NBD/Biblion, commented: “Ex Libris is a world-renowned supplier of library systems to famous libraries around the globe and has an excellent international reputation.” On behalf of Ex Libris, Mr. Ullrich Jungling, sales and marketing director of Ex Libris (Deutschland), added: “We are looking forward to collaborating with NBD/Biblion in its ongoing work of making library resources readily accessible to millions of Dutch citizens.”

After the press conference, the parties celebrated the signing with a marvelous lunch at the Allemansgeest restaurant.

100 Customers and Counting!

100 Customers and Counting!

Ex Libris (UK) celebrated the addition of its 100th customer during the April 2009 Ex Libris Products User Group, UK and Ireland (EPUG-UKI) meeting, which took place at the University of Edinburgh’s magnificent Holyrood campus.

The 100th Ex Libris (UK) customer is the University of East London (UEL), which selected the Primo® discovery and delivery solution, the Aleph® integrated library system, and the Company’s e-product suite - the SFX® OpenURL link resolver, MetaLib® gateway and metasearch portal and Verde® e-resource management system in February 2009, at the conclusion of a competitive tendering process. The University of East London is an exciting, diverse learning community that aims to foster in its students enthusiasm for new ideas, new knowledge, and new learning, and give the students the opportunities to excel in their chosen careers.

Ex Libris (UK) has set a target of reaching 110 customers this year, and with our new customers University College Dublin (SFX and MetaLib), Liverpool Hope University (SFX and MetaLib), the University of Sunderland (SFX and MetaLib), and Blackpool and The Fylde College (Primo, SFX, and MetaLib) all following the lead of UEL, we are well on our way to achieving it!

Alan Oliver, business development director, Ex Libris (UK)

Customers Take Center Stage at German Librarian Days

Customers Take Center Stage at German Librarian Days

Erfurt, Germany was the host of the 2009 German Librarian Days event attended by Ex Libris (Germany) and many of our customers from German speaking countries. Participants from the UK, US, China, Italy, Canada, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Spain, Czech Republic, and Turkey also attended this year’s event. Ex Libris Germany organized a forum on the theme of “cutting-edge software solutions for libraries: reports of users”, at which four customers gave highly interesting presentations.

The first presentation was given by Mr. Wolfram Neubauer, director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), who spoke about the ETH library’s knowledge portal, which will be implemented with the Primo® discovery and delivery solution. The ETH vision is to provide users with a single access point to all electronic information services of the library. This comes as a response to a survey that was taken at ETH Zurich which revealed that the main problems affecting the usage of the library’s e-resources are the lack of integration of the huge number of information packages to which the institution subscribes; the complex structure of these information packages; and the library’s current search application, which is not generally intuitive. With the single point of access provided by Primo, ETH Zurich will be able to fulfill the expectations of its users.

Mr. Wolfgang Hamedinger, managing director of the Austrian Library Network (OBVSG), talked about the unique Aleph® ASP service that OBVSG provides to members of the OBVSG consortium, following an agreement made with Ex Libris over five years ago. Thanks to this service, smaller libraries can afford to use a sophisticated solution such as Aleph and be active members of the larger consortium.

In the third presentation Mr. Ere Maijala, the IT research specialist at the National Library of Finland, focused on the Finnish national information retrieval portal called Nelli, used to direct users’ search to several different databases. The Nelli portal, built on the Ex Libris MetaLib® gateway and metasearch solution and SFX® OpenURL link resolver, identifies end users using Shibboleth and offers them personalized services such as resource lists and a personal electronic bookshelf. Mr. Maijala gave technical background information on the project and explained how responsibilities are distributed between project members.

Mr Maijala explained that the central Nelli office coordinates the maintenance of MetaLib and SFX, and is responsible for installing product and KnowledgeBase updates, customization of MetaLib and SFX, training staff from member libraries, and developing code enhancements for the systems (which are also shared via EL Commons). In parallel, member libraries of the Nelli portal customize their local systems and train end users. Each library also manages its own MetaLib quicksets and SFX targets.

Mr. Matthias Gross of the Bavarian State Library concluded the customer forum with his presentation about the consortium of Bavarian Library Network members which run SFX. Since 2003, the SFX link-server infrastructure has been installed in 23 locations within the network. Mr. Gross described the interaction between the individual libraries in the consortium and with Ex Libris, as well as their use of the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) service.

The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek EZB (Electronic Journals Library) service enhances the effective use of both scientific and academic journals published as full text articles on the internet. The Universitatsbibliothek Regensburg (University Library of Regensburg) in cooperation with the Universitatsbibliothek der Technischen Universitat Munchen (University Library of the Technical University of Munich)—the developers of the system—in coordination with 510 German libraries and research institutions, make use of this service in their daily work by cooperatively updating bibliographic data for these publications in a central database.

Together, these four presentations gave the audience an illuminating overview of how some of our users have customized Ex Libris solutions to meet the needs of their libraries and consortia. We look forward to meeting customers and colleagues at next year’s German Librarian Days, in Leipzig, Germany.

Daniela Wittig, marketing manager, Ex Libris (Germany)

Ex Libris Europe Welcomes New Primo Institutions

Ex Libris Europe Welcomes New Primo Institutions

In recent months, Ex Libris has welcomed many new institutions to the European Primo community, including:

Austria:The Austrian Library Network and Service Ltd. (OBVSG), Vienna University, University of Innsbruck, and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna

France:Sainte-Barbe Interuniversity Library and Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University, the Universite de Nice Sophia Antipolis, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Institut national de recherche pedagogique, and Bibliotheque Interuniversitaire de lettres et sciences humaines in Lyon;

United Kingdom: University of East London and Blackpool and The Fylde College

At the May 2009 meeting of Ex Libris users from German-speaking countries (DACHELA), which took place in Cologne, Germany, library staff members from the KOBV consortium in Berlin and the Austrian OBVSG consortium gave presentations on their experience of implementing Primo.

The Primo implementation project at the KOBV consortium has several goals, which include the central hosting of a single point of access for all participating institutions and the central indexing of diverse research resources as well as the individual Aleph® catalogs of participating libraries. Above all, the Primo project will provide ease-of-use for users by providing a single access point to all resource types and by optimizing the speed of the information supply by providing streamlined delivery of print, digital, and electronic resources. As a consortium, each of the institutions will gain from sharing information and resources.

The Primo team reported that they quickly met the library’s requirements during the preparatory phase and that they are looking forward to making the Primo service live to users later in 2009. The Primo implementation will be carried out by a collaborative team of staff members from across the library.

KOBV was pleased to report that staff members have completed, in cooperation with OBVSG, the normalization of harvested data. The flexibility and openness of Primo enabled new pipes to be created for the normalization of German catalog data in the MAB library exchange format—in use in many German libraries. The EL Commons Web site provides a useful platform for further cooperation and the exchange of normalization rules.

The main objectives of the OBVSG implementation project are similar to those of KOBV--complete access from a single point to all the resources and collections belonging to the participating institutions. Additionally, this project focuses on integrating different information sources into the discovery environment while preserving the corporate identity of the institution’s user interface. One of the first information resources to be integrated is eDOC, a digital repository for electronic versions of theses and many other digital objects and full text articles.

The Primo project team will build a unified Primo system at the OBVSG with data delivery from the central Aleph catalogs and the local repositories. One of the many benefits gained by institutions of different sizes that are sharing a sophisticated application like Primo is that smaller libraries are able to obtain information just as easily as their larger counterparts.

At the DACHELA user group meeting, representatives from the University of Mannheim also reported on the progress of their project, which has now moved from the pilot stage to full-scale implementation.

All the teams that gave presentations at the meeting expressed their satisfaction with their achievements and are confident that they will remain within the project time frames that they have defined.

Daniela Wittig, marketing manager, Ex Libris (Germany)

Aleph Training for Librarians of the Israel College Consortium

Aleph Training for Librarians of the Israel College Consortium

In keeping with the Israel College Consortium’s long-standing tradition of maintaining high professional standards among its members, librarians from the consortium attended an intensive three-day training session provided by Ex Libris in February 2009.

Selected by the ICC steering committees and the Ex Libris Aleph support team, the topics covered in the training included, among others, the new ISO interlibrary loan functionality, course reading management, advanced booking, Aleph digital asset management (ADAM), and multilanguage and multidirectional cataloging issues unique to the ICC.

Member institutions contributed their state-of-the-art training facilities as well as technology staff to assist in technical matters, and everything proceeded as smoothly as can be. To accommodate the geographic distribution of the member institutions, the three-day training was given three times, each in a different location. One session was held at the Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel, in northern Israel; another took place in Jerusalem at the David Yellin College of Education; and a third session was given at the MOFET Institute in Tel Aviv.

The next three-day advanced training session for librarians of the ICC consortium will take place later in the year.

Do you Web 2.0? An Introduction to Learning 2.0 @LJMU

Do you Web 2.0? An Introduction to Learning 2.0 @LJMU

Learning 2.0 @LJMU(Liverpool John Moores University) is a hands-on, interactive learning program designed initially for Learning and Information Services (LIS) staff in order to get them more familiar with, and provide an opportunity for them to explore, Web 2.0 tools and the impact that they are having on teaching and learning. All program participants were encouraged to think about ways in which the university’s Library and Student Support Services could use Web 2.0 technologies to deliver innovative services.

Learning 2.0 @LJMU is all about exploration, discovery, and play!

During the 12-week learning program, sponsored by Ex Libris (UK), participants used freely available online tools (such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) in addition to technology-enhanced learning tools (such as Blackboard) to complete a number of activities. Each week focused on a specific type of tool (for example, blogs, social networking, and wikis), and each activity gave participants an opportunity to explore the tool and consider the ways in which it could be used in teaching and learning.

The culmination of the first Learning 2.0 @LJMU program was an award ceremony in May 2009. The prize for best team effort went to a group that solicited online presentations about how Web 2.0 affected individuals and their work during the program. Other prizes were given for the outstanding team player and the most improved team player.

Learning 2.0 @LJMU is undergoing an accreditation process by the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA), which is the professional association for staff and educational developers in the UK and promotes innovation and good practice in higher education.

For further information on Learning 2.0 @LJMU, contact Leo Appleton, head of business and planning of Library and Student Support Services, Liverpool John Moores University (l.appleton1@ljmu.ac.uk).

Alan Oliver, business development director, Ex Libris (UK)

Coming Back

Coming Back - Systems Seminar 2009

This year’s Ex Libris Systems Seminar in Tel Aviv was held at the same conference venue as in 2002, and I even stayed at the same hotel as last time, so it felt like returning to somewhere very familiar. Unlike the 2002 seminar, when Aleph was the sole topic, this year’s spectrum was far broader, covering all the products that Ex Libris now offers. Because my home institution is implementing Primo now, I spent most of the time on the Primo track. The lectures were good and helpful, and the Ex Libris hospitality was great—as always.

Besides the lectures, we had many opportunities to talk to Ex Libris developers about all the hot topics—the central knowledge bases, the Unified Resource Management framework, further development of the Verde® system, and so on. And, of course, it was great to meet up again with all the colleagues from around the world, many of whom I’ve known for almost 10 years! The only cloud cast over the seminar was the outcome of the football match: for the first time, the customers lost to the company. But we had a lot of fun in the pleasant pubs and restaurants during the Tel Aviv evenings, and there we already began to plot our revenge J

Customer Football Team

Jiri Kende, IGeLU Chair

ELUNA Conference 2009

ELUNA Conference 2009

ELUNA 2009 was held the first week of May in Richmond, Virginia, right after the Ex Libris Technical Seminar. In spite of the current economic situation, attendance was excellent, at 525 participants. In addition to participants from North America, people came to Virginia from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America to participate in the conference.

The local host this year was the Library of Virginia, with the able assistance of other institutions in the area. The library’s staff invested considerable time and effort in ensuring that adequate space was available for library representatives and Ex Libris staff to meet and socialize. Thanks to the relaxed and comfortable setting provided by the library, participants were able to enjoy, and learn from, each other and the event.

Over 70 concurrent breakout sessions covered all Ex Libris products. Among the most popular sessions were the Voyager® Access Reporting sessions and the Aleph® Ask the Experts session. For the first time, a separate track was devoted to Primo® presentations, a fact that reflects on the large number of sites that have implemented this new product. Another track offered cross-product sessions, musings on the next-generation systems, and a welcome presentation on best practices in project management and leadership. Handouts for most sessions have been posted on the ELUNA website and are available to all members of ELUNA.

One of the big discussion points of the conference was the URMTM (Unified Resource Management) framework. Introduced for the first time in Long Beach in 2008, the development of URM has come a long way. The URM framework was presented in detail in a number of sessions, including Oren Beit-Arie’s talk on service-oriented librarianship, in which he discussed trends, realities, and thoughts that are driving Ex Libris to create a new framework for library services. Ex Libris also led a number of heavily attended focus groups on various aspects of URM. The future of library systems is definitely on people’s minds, but at the same time, there is a need to manage our current systems efficiently and get the most out of them. The conference helped maintain this balance.

In addition to breakout sessions, plenary sessions, and poster sessions, the conference featured numerous product updates, product group meetings, special interest group get-togethers, and regional user group meetings.

Once again, Ex Libris hosted the Tuesday evening reception that opened the conference, with a blue-grass band providing live music. This event, along with the Thursday evening reception and shared mealtimes, offered a great opportunity for participants to get together and socialize, to catch up with old friends, and to finally “put a face to the name”!

What would a technologically themed conference be without technology to aid in the dissemination of information? In addition to the traditional Web sites for conference proceedings and registration, this year saw the first extensive use of Twitter and blogging not only on laptops but also on handheld devices. The free Internet that we were able to provide facilitated much of this communication, and future years should see a greater level of use.

The ELUNA Conference could not have taken place without the considerable effort of the host site coordinators and volunteers, program committee members, presenters, moderators, and others, who all worked tirelessly throughout the year to produce a high quality program of events. Ex Libris contributed to the conference by providing speakers, staff, general assistance, and sponsorship of the opening reception. Many thanks to everyone who dedicated so much time and expertise to the success of the conference.

Finally, on the conference evaluation form, participants noted the value of “hearing colleagues talk about their successes and challenges” and “following the tweets about the conference on Twitter.” The following comments speak for themselves:

“The best part of ELUNA conferences is networking with other users and Ex Libris staff.”

“Every session I attended was very beneficial to me and my staff.”

Next year’s ELUNA Conference will find us in Fort Worth, Texas, and the planning is already underway. Please mark May 11-13, 2010, on your calendars. See you there!

Ex Libris 2009 Technical Seminar

The beautiful historic city of Richmond, Virginia, was the setting of the Ex Libris 2009 Technical Seminar, which took place on May 4 and 5, prior to the Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) conference. Surrounded by sites that played a major role in the early years of the United States of America, more than 150 Ex Libris customers learned new techniques for using Ex Libris products and discussed the future of librarianship.

Participants from 102 institutions in eight countries—Australia, Barbados, Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States—attended the two-day comprehensive educational and training program. Among the seminar participants were library directors, librarians working in public and technical services, systems librarians, developers, and IT staff involved in integrating Ex Libris products into their institutional environments.

As a result of feedback from the previous seminar, this year’s program offered a greater number of advanced and hands-on training sessions, such as Voyager® WebVoyage customization and Primo® API sessions. The schedule also featured Voyager and Aleph® certification courses, a refresher course on the MetaLib® gateway and metasearch solution, and seven product tracks with 49 sessions, including cross-product presentations.

The sessions were taught by Ex Libris developers, product managers, and professional services and global support staff, whose expertise enabled the participants to benefit from the most up-to-date, expert information available.

“I learned a lot during the two days of the technical seminar,” commented Prabha Acharya, a developer at Texas A&M University. “It was great to meet the people who work on the Ex Libris products and pick their brains.”

In addition to the technical training, Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, kicked off each day with a thought-provoking presentation on his view of the future of libraries and the ways in which librarians can respond to the ever changing information environment.

To the delight of all, Twitter made its Ex Libris seminar debut, conveying comments by participants and staff on session content, plans to meet for dinner, and post-seminar updates.

It’s time to mark down the dates of the 2010 Technical Seminar: May 9-10, 2010, in Fort Worth, Texas. We hope to see y’all there!

Loralynne Evans, marketing manager, Ex Libris North America

Blown away in the Windy City at ALA Annual 2009

Blown away in the Windy City at ALA Annual 2009

Ex Libris was delighted to be an exhibitor and participant at the ALA Annual 2009 Conference which took place in Chicago this July. During the conference, attended by over 27,000 library and information professionals, Ex Libris hosted five educational seminars with industry thought leaders and colleagues from libraries across the globe.

Continuing the Conversation: A Further Exploration of the Brave New World of Metadata – addressed the challenge of providing controlled data in the constantly changing context of today’s expanding library catalog.80 participants took part in this illuminating panel discussion, which included Barbara Tillett from the Library of Congress and Jon Phipps from the consultancy Metadata Management Associates.

Exploring issues around the Ex Libris next-generation Unified Resource Management (URMTM)framework, the second seminar brought together over 70 participants for an interactive session entitled Construction Ahead: Building the Next-Generation Library Services Framework. On the panel, representatives of URM development partners, Bob Gerrity of Boston College and Janet Lute of Princeton University (and former Chair of Ex Libris Users of North America—ELUNA)—together with Kathryn Harnish, URM product director, and Susan Stearns, VP for strategic partnerships—facilitated a fascinating discussion on the process of defining and building a framework to serve current and future library management needs.

bX: Users Who Looked At This Article Also Looked At... introduced participants to bX, the exciting new recommender service for scholarly articles. bX was developed by the same team that created SFX and the OpenURL standard, a collaboration of Ex Libris and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) renowned researchers Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel.Oren Beit-Arie, chief strategy officer at Ex Libris, with Bob Gerrity of Boston College, explained the magic of bX to over 40 participants at this seminar.

Jorgen Madsen of the Royal Library of Denmark, together with Tamar Sadeh, director of marketing, and Gilad Gal, Primo product manager, presented a seminar on Redefining What it Means to be “At the Library”. During the session, participants discussed the myriad ways in which Primo goes beyond the standard OPAC to offer the search box in a variety of user portals, from Facebook to a mobile device, and provide customized access for users.

The final Ex Libris seminar, Cook Up Some Code - and Have a Taste of the Library You Always Wanted, was presented by Tamar Sadeh with developers Mark Dehmlow of the University of Notre Dame, and Daniel Forsman of Jonkoping University in Sweden. Participants enjoyed an overview of the Ex Libris open-platform program, launched in 2008, which provides a robust infrastructure enabling the user community to easily customize, integrate, and extend Ex Libris products via EL Commons.

On a more informal level, Ex Libris also hosted three round-table discussions on current achievements in the field of digital preservation, and three open discussion groups on issues related to the URM framework.

SFX—the first OpenURL link resolver—is still the most popular worldwide.[1] While linking to electronic content is always the focus of SFX, the breadth of SFX functionality has been significantly enhanced over the years to meet the evolving requirements of our continually growing customer base—which today numbers over 1800 sites located in 50 countries around the world.

Today, SFX is a true intermediary between the various platforms and systems that the library employs to guide end users to the best services available. Examples of such services are links to electronic full text or to a service providing a printed copy, links to tables of contents and abstracts, and options for downloading citations. The openness of SFX and its ease of customization, together with its extensive functionality and modules for usage collection, statistics, and e-resource collection analysis, make the solution truly unique in the marketplace.

The knowledge base, which lies at the heart of SFX and serves as the basis for many of its functions, is naturally a key focus of our work. In the last 12 months, the knowledge base has grown by 40% to include thousands of full-text targets, and 50% more e-book targets. The range of resources includes global and regional targets as well as those designed in partnership with consortia. The addition of regional targets continues to be central to our strategy. In the first half of 2009, we added a significant number of French, Spanish, German, and Asian language targets.

In recent months, important targets were added from the following publishers:

Karger: Journal Archive Collection, which consists of five medical packages. The collection includes all Karger journal issues starting with each title's original publication and continuing to 1997. Karger expects to complete the collection by the end of 2009.

Knovel: Sustainable Energy and Development collection of 58 books from various publishers, covering all aspects of green technology

Gale®: 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, the largest single archive of 17th and 18th century news media available from the British Library. The original full-text newspapers and pamphlets from the United Kingdom were collected by the Reverend Charles Burney.

vLex: Legal books and journals from 132 countries in 13 languages

Among the resources that we are adding in the near future are ebrary Public Library Complete collection; ebrary Religion, Philosophy & Classics; ebrary Sociology & Anthropology; and ABC-CLIO’s History Reference Online.

The SFX team is hard at work designing and developing our next major product release—SFX version 4.0—which focuses on providing greater efficiency for library staff, and enhancing the e-book user experience. Stay tuned for more information and updates on this exciting new product version.